Commentary: Poe's stories get us in the mood for madness

OK, class. Raise your hand if you loved Edgar Allan Poe as a teenager, even when you didn’t entirely understand what he was talking about?

I mean, to this day, I’m not sure what Amontillado is, but I sure as heck wouldn’t go in the basement of anyone who offered a sip. At the very least, I’d take a sledgehammer along in case of encasement.

October is the month of Poe. We can get all spooky about supernatural beings — zombies and vampires and ghosts, oh my — but for true chills on gloomy nights, we look to the man who mined the horrors of the human heart.

Gamut Classic Theatre in Harrisburg is staging the works of Poe Oct. 5-7 with “Poe: Much of Madness.” Director of Development David Ramon Zayas created the piece by blending “The Cask of Amontillado” (bricked up in the cellar by a wronged rival), “Annabel Lee” (heart-rending loss), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1-percenters walling out death — they think), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (got away with murder, did you? Lub-dub, lub-dub), and “The Raven” (well, you know).

Poe’s characters and stories are “so scary because they touch on something in everyone,” Zayas said. Love, jealousy, greed, guilt — Poe just wraps them in a “noticeably darker scenario.”

“The things that are wrong with the narrators or villains in his stories are rarely huge, grand things,” he said. “They’re just little differences in their perception that, when you follow on its course, leads them to do these horrible deeds. It’s the closeness of it to all of our lives that resonates.”

Oh — so I haven’t murdered a kind old man because his eye was kinda funny and then been driven to confess by the sound of his beating heart, but I’m just a step or two away?

“When you have done something that grates on your conscience, there are reminders everywhere,” Zayas said.

Gamut also performs “Poe: Much of Madness” for middle and high school students — a very receptive audience. Each of us probably has a Poe-enamored teenager in our lives right now.

What’s the attraction? Zayas recalls one writer’s explanation.

“Poe’s characters are experiencing a mess of feelings that are all very close to each other,” he said. “They experience love and hate and fear and disgust and vengeance in a way where the lines between them get very blurred. This can resonate with adolescents. That’s kind of like where your emotions are. The clear lines aren’t clear yet.”

Do they ever become clear? Maybe that’s the enduring attraction of Poe. So, every October, we take a deep breath, bring him out of the crypt, and confront the man who sees into our souls. October is the time of year when people “want to be scared and see something dark,” Zayas said.

“It’s a very real part of human existence. When we allow ourselves this time every year to acknowledge it in a safe way, it helps us keep our peace with it. It becomes easier to face when you get this practice.”

Wow. That’s deep. But I’ll ponder it later. In the meantime, dusk is settling in, and I think I’ll find a breezy little Poe story to read. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” maybe? “The Black Cat” would be nice. Ah, here’s a good one. Time to curl up with “The Premature Burial.” 